An Evening With Nuts and Volts
by ColMikeFuser
Summary: An idea can strike like lightning. Beetee and Wiress have invented a way to capture energy from thunderstorms. They convince Seneca Crane to supply a critical resource for the project. And they get help from the Rebels. The tricky part is to keep Snow from figuring out that he's helping the Rebels to overthrow him. It all begins one evening in Beetee's study...
1. Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE. The Underground Inventor

Colonel Boggs poked his head in my office door.

"Mike, what do you make of this?", as he pointed to the holographic projector strapped to his wrist, which we call a Holo, and played a three-dimensional animated display of two luminous blobs shrinking and jiggling as if dancing to the music of an invisible drummer, then collapsing into a lightning bolt, and extinguishing their lights in one flash.

"Himmler's two hundredth birthday or something?"

"Nope."

"LeMay's 200th? They both liked lightning in their heraldry."

"Nope. I'm dead serious."

"Somebody's physics experiment?"

"You're getting warmer." He played it again.

"Quantum entanglement at great distance?"

"Yup. Discovered in Three last week."

"By anyone we know?"

"Dr Beetee Latier."

"Boggsy, are you saying that Beetee cracked the lightning paradox as a quantum phenomenon?"

"One better. He cracked it and he's keeping it to himself. He's sharing the details with us, on the quiet."

The Lightning Paradox is an ancient problem in electrodynamics that has stubbornly resisted an answer, basically, since Benjamin Franklin flew a kite into a thunderstorm and collected a wee bit of atmospheric electricity in a crude capacitor, made of two pieces of lead foil and a glass jar.

The problem is this. For lightning to strike, a strong concentration of negative charge must build up at one point in a cloud, and an equally strong concentration of positive charge must build up at a different point. When the charge is sufficiently concentrated, air molecules break apart into an ionized plasma and the charges conduct through the plasma until neutralized. But there's a catch.

The positive charges repel each other. So do the negative charges. The electrostatic force decreases as the square of the distance between charges. Any force of electrostatic attraction, acting over a mile's distance, is completely swamped out, by the repulsion between like charges a few microinches apart. Lightning ought to be impossible because of this.

Yet thousands of lightning strokes happen every day. Most are several miles long.

The only way to reconcile these facts, is to acknowledge a mystery mechanism of some sort, that enables like charges to cease repelling and begin attracting opposite charges, miles away from their location, then suddenly to move in waves. And Beetee Latier cracked the secret of the mechanism?

"Is Beetee guessing or did he actually build something to test it out?"

"The President wants you to go look at his test. She's got your cover story and transport organized. You HAHO jump into Three this evening, camp in Beetee's basement with Portia's hubby, and meet the new Head Game maker, Seneca Crane, who thinks you're an Avox from District Nine who tidies up the lab for Beetee. Go home and pack. You both exfil on an empty coal train to Twelve and hover off at night."

"What the hell do Avoxes in Three wear?"

"My kiddo will bring something to your quarters."

"And what's Commander Talbot's cover story?"

"He's a dead scientist twice his age, who defected to the Capitol the week after we had his funeral. Levias Talbot does quite an impression. You'll recognize the guy. When you do, don't blow your damn cover, Mike. It would be quite boring around here if the Peacekeepers cut your tongue out."

Two hours later I was on the hoverplane, rolling along the elevator to the landing pad. My grey work uniform was in our laundry, and I had on a maroon coverall with a white shirt and construction boots. My Avox District Three I.D. card, freshly counterfeited by the Intelligence Office, hung from a lanyard around my neck. It matched the turkey-like stylized Panem eagle on the right breast pocket, bore the same Avox Registry Number inked and barcoded on my left wrist, and resembled the targets we train troops on, in the simulations. Over it all was a zippered coverall with thick insulation, and strapped to my back and tummy were main and reserve parachutes. On my right hip was an oxygen tank that gave me ten minutes of useful breathing, attached to an oxygen mask that hung from my helmet.

The blast doors opened, flooding the hoverplane with brilliant outdoor light. The pilot powered up the engines, brought our Invisibility Cloak online, and lifted off, heading westward into the afternoon sun.

I practiced my silence.

If I was going undercover as a person whose ability to speak had been surgically taken, the fast way to become a Capitol prisoner and torture victim, was to say anything. So my mouth was going to stay zipped, as much as possible.

I did borrow a book from the Army library to read on the trip. It was a biography of James Clerk Maxwell, the Nineteenth century English physicist, whose system of 13 equations laid the foundation of most known physics. I opened it to the middle, and re-read the treatment of Luminiferous Aether, the invisible rubbery stuff that Maxwell guessed to permeate the entire universe, and to vibrate at a single harmonic speed, enabling waves of alternating electricity and magnetism to travel at exactly one velocity, symbolized by the letter 'c'. Light waves moved at c, nominally a billion feet per second.

Maxwell's aether guess, led to a lot of subsequent guesses by other researchers. A Swiss patent clerk named Einstein, guessed that adding energy to a piece of matter would speed it up until it gradually approached c. When the mass of the added energy exactly equalled the rest mass, the lump of matter ought to become pure energy and disappear in an expanding flash of light. The Einstein guess assumed that the light would radiate away from the point at which the matter stopped existing, but that the portion of the light that went sideways or backward, would have a shift of its momentum that colored the light more red and less violet.

Another fellow named Planck, who was writing to the same audience as Einstein, had found a quirky number he called 'h'. The Planck number, h, seemed to relate the mass of a lump of matter, to the color of the light that would be formed, if, as Einstein predicted, the matter reached the speed c and flashed off in an expanding sphere of observable light.

Neither of these theorists ever observed what they predicted, but their numbers, c and h, kept turning up in so many different experiments and observations, that they were widely taken to be fact. Complicating matters, Maxwell's aether was never proven to exist, nor was it disproven. For a century and a half, it was simply forgotten, and replaced with geometries that replaced lines with curves. Toss in the fact that any equation with a fifth-or-higher power, has not one solution set, but an arbitrary choice of solution sets, and the Twenty-first century commenced, with damnably little in physics, that made complete sense, in light of everything else.

What had me enthralled was the memory of Beetee Latier, as a young Victor in his Hunger Games, hurling two whirling stones, linked by a leather strap, that he built himself in the woods, using a dead snake to provide the leather. As the Career tribute from District Two strangled in Beetee's weapon, Beetee cried out to the hidden microphones, "Clerk Maxwell, I avenge thee!".

At the time, nobody in the entire nation of Panem knew what that meant. A week later, in his post-game interview, having used the weapons he took from the dead tribute, to fashion a generator that killed most of the other competitors by electrocution, he lapsed into a lengthy talk about the Aether Drag and an ancient scholar named The Sedge, who had falsely accused Maxwell, that got most everyone in the country bored to tears. The few who actually learned about Conrad Lorentz' notion, that matter must cause the Aether to shrink away from it, otherwise the Aether would create a dragging force that caused all moving objects to slow down, at least knew for certain that Beetee was babbling about Maxwell the physicist.

Aether drag, if it happened, would cause orbiting planets to slow down and collapse into their suns, spinning galaxies to crush themselves into single giant masses, and the matter in the universe to shrink together. So Lorentz proposed Aether drag, then countered it with the shrinkage of matter as it's speed increased. Einstein copied Lorentz, proposing also that light would be bent by gravity. Subsequent theorists devised all manner of variations, that proved useful within certain narrow circumstances but often led to paradox. And the secret side of Beetee Latier, seemed to have reconceived that issue somehow.

One amazing property of those mouldy old books full of formulae, is that they induce sleep.

Despite my usual case of jangled nerves, that strikes anytime I am to egress a functioning aircraft and fly a parachute to the ground, fooling around in my head with Beetee - think, got me to doze off. So I was quite startled to hear the buzz of a klaxon and see a red light blinking by the rear door of the hoverplane. The cabin lighting was out. The windows revealed a dark, starry night with a pink smudge of Aurora borealis to our distant north, and an undercast of gently-rolling clouds.

"Five minutes to target, all personnel mask up!", called the pilot. Odd. The pilot doesn't know how many people are jumping.

I donned my oxygen mask, checked for flow, and signaled thumbs up to the night camera. Wide awake now, my jangled nerves went back on full alert.

The pilot started lowering the cargo hatch.

I secured the moldy old book to the troop seat with the seatbelt, rechecked my kit, and ensured all the straps were snug.

I felt damnably cold as the six-mile-high atmosphere sucked the last of the warmth out of the cabin. Some ice needles formed in my exhaled breath and glued themselves to the window. A gob of snot ran down the back of my throat, pushed by the trapped air in my sinuses and inner ears, and I swallowed hard to clear it. My hands felt chilly and I flexed my gloves and stamped my feet, to chase the chill.

The light changed to a steady red.

The pilot's voice was muffled by the thin air and the whistling of wind at the rear of the hoverplane, but still plain. "Thirty Seconds to target."

I tried counting to ten, slowly.

On fourteen, the light turned green and the pilot called out, "Jump! Jump! Jump!".

I ran three steps and kicked away from the edge of the cargo ramp, spreading my arms and legs to get the feel of the air, and waited until I counted down from fifteen, to bring my hands together and tap sharply on my Holo.

The moving map display opened, showing the drop zone off to my right, and the entry point, four miles up, where I ought open my parachute. I steered with spread arms and legs, turning to the right and the aurora, then weaving side to side a bit, to avoid overshooting the entry point, while the ground grew closer and the air thicker. A few hundred feet higher than minimum, I crossed the entry point, grabbed the 'D'-ring handle, and pulled my chute open.

The chute straps snapped at my shoulders and inner thighs as my spine felt the crunch of impact. I remembered where I'd be sore the next morning, from every jump I ever made before. I worked the left and right pitch cables, keeping the chute steered on the course the Holo displayed. On my right I could see the red glow of moonrise. The hoverplane had a cloaking system to conceal it, but my chute would be plainly visible in the moonlight. But the clouds beneath were approaching fast, and soon I was drifting in cloud so dark and silent, my Holo was hard to see.

The cloud began to thin and became grainy, as the lights of District Three came into view. Soon I recognized snowflakes, drifting down with me as I followed the course. The sinking air beneath the snow squall was pulling me down, and I was glad of the extra altitude I had at entry. Crossing twelve thousand feet of altitude, my Holo signaled time to lighten my load. I unstrapped the oxygen tank from my right hip, pulled away the facemask and hose, with a blob of my frozen saliva and exhaled moisture frozen to the drip bag, wadded it up, and waited for the Holo to signal for cutaway. I dropped the empty oxygen bottle on signal, and cut away my reserve parachute, letting both weights drop into freefall toward an expanse of open water...the District reservoir...beneath whose surface it would remain hidden. I tried not to think what else had fallen in the District drinking water supply over the years. And then resolved to drink beer if Beetee had any. It might be less toxic than the drinking water. Also we had no beer in District Thirteen.

At six thousand nine hundred feet of elevation was a mountaintop park in a volcanic caldera. Nobody would be sunbathing on the manmade sand beach that ran three hundred yards along the east shore of the crater lake. Snowy darkness is not conducive to sunbathing or swimming. I hoped the Holo was accurate about my position, because I had no desire to parachute into freezing cold water during a snow squall, either.

I saw the outline of the mountain ahead. There was some snow on the upper quarter of it, and below that, the ground looked soggy, as if it had been raining heavily. The Holo showed a green 'x', on an outline map of the mountain, where the beach was. As I drifted nearer, I pulled the pitch of the chute as far back as I could, trying to maintain altitude until I neared the X. I was running maybe fifty feet above the planned glide slope, when I finally caught a bit of an updraft.

And that's when I had an unpleasant surprise.

Ahead, just above the mountain, a dark foggy blob appeared. It had a rounded top and a flat bottom.

Lens-shaped clouds are a nasty sign during mountain flying. They form when winds crossing over the mountain, gain a lot of speed, so that the same volume of air that passes by the mountain per unit time, can likewise move over the mountain and back down.

I was about to be violently lifted and dragged forward, at exactly the place where I intended to slow to a crawl and drop gently to the ground.

This landing would not be gentle.

A green dot appeared on the Holo, a bit east of the X. That should mean that Talbot was waiting for me. His Holo would show a green parachute, about where I am, if it was working properly. I steered westward, out over the lake. This might get Levias Talbot a bit anxious, but what the hell, I thought. If the weather is bad, I would have some fun with it.

As my flight path moved out over the frigid lake, the wind accelerated me forward furiously, and the updraft was lifting me into the lens cloud. As I drew alongside the green dot, I pulled hard on my left pitch cord, dumping out air and accelerating downward, while curving to the left. With my legs hanging outward on a forty-five degree slope, my flight path overshot Levias and I swung furiously west ward. I popped out of the lens cloud with a good view of the caldera's rim. Maintaining my downward slope and rate of rotation, I was now moving backwards to the south, into a contrary but much slower wind and dropped even with the caldera's rim.

As I looped around, pointing due north, my chute caught the updraft again. I was lifting rapidly upwards, dumping air as fast as I could to slow my ascent, and finally drew just above the treetops at the south rim. I let some air build under the chute, came rapidly and roughly over the trees and over the rocky rim with about sixty feet to spare. The moment I could see into the caldera, I dumped air and got rid of some altitude. About ten feet above the rim and flying in ground effect, my feet cleared the rim and I banked hard right while pitching hard downward. Good. I didn't fly into the rocks, bust every bone in my body, and have to swallow my nightlock pill.

I was rewarded with what felt like a wall of air pushing against me. Below the caldera's rim, the wind was much lighter, and my own momentum carried me forward, while slowing. I banked, turning right, and spotted Levias Talbot, just where the Holo said he would be. Playing with my forward momentum, I made a complete circle around him before dropping into the snow-covered sand and bruising my butt as I slid through the snow. The chute billowed up a bit but I held the pitch controls hard down, dumped air, and it no longer was lifting me.

"Have a good flight, Colonel?", asked Levias.

I made a fist with my right hand and gave a tapping motion to my forehead. Then pointed my index finger at my throat. Sign-language for "stupid" and "unable to speak."

We rolled up the parachute, filled it with rocks, and tossed it into the lake. The snowfall would cover our footprints, and the wind would help. We carefully made our way over the mountain rim, slipped into Dr Erik Wasserstrom's auto, and drove to Beetee Latier's house.


	2. Chapter 2: Forces and Habits

CHAPTER TWO: Forces and Habits

Erik Wasserstrom's class was one of my favorites, when I was a young student in District Thirteen. Erik was of the opinion that mathematics should be taught, within the context in which it had been discovered or applied. Nobody counted for the sake of counting. Primitive man discovered how to count, to express an idea. The size of an animal herd. The time it would take to reach the next watering hole. The difficulty of lifting an object.

So we never attended a math class of Dr Wasserstrom's, without also getting a history lesson, about how a sort of problem was first conceived, and why the folks who discovered a particular mathematical trick, found it useful. Everybody learned something from his classes.

The three geeks who were Boggs, Portia, and myself, had more fun with those classes than most folks understood. I was going through a rough period at the time. I grew up in District Nine, a farm kid. My uncle and my dad got the idea one winter, to jump the fence, stow away on an empty coal train, and escape to District Thirteen. I was the only survivor. Peacekeepers slaughtered the rest of us. The last words my mother spoke to me, were "Don't look back, Mike". I heard the pistol shot. And I kept on walking. A week later, starved, freezing, nauseous from drinking bad water, pissed off that the Peacekeepers had made me an orphan, feet blistered bloody and holes in my boots, I stumbled into four grey-uniformed soldiers on roving patrol in Thirteen and got taken in. There was some care given me, at the Infirmary, for the blisters and the nausea. And two days later, at age 12, I was put to work in one of our underground farms, and sent to school.

Thirteen was principally a bomb shelter that could shoot back.

Most of what we did, was done underground. For most of our history, we were mainly about survival. We had a command economy. Most adults were soldiers. All the young adults were soldiers. We worked. We studied. And we waited for the opportunity to overthrow the regime of Panem's President-for-life, Coriolanus Snow.

Life was not easy in Thirteen.

What we did not endure in Thirteen, was the full tyranny of the Snow regime.

Snow's Capitol lorded over the districts, taking whatever it wanted, leaving barely enough to survive. And to get enough food actually to survive, district people had to sign up for treasure, called by its Latin name, _tesserae._ Every child between the ages of twelve and eighteen, could sign up multiple times. For every gift of soybean oil and cereal treasure that a family got, their children's names were entered into the Reaping Bowl an additional time. Every summer, between spring planting and the summer hay and grain harvests, a public Reaping was held. Two children, a boy and a girl, would be picked from among the names in the bowl, and sent into an arena to battle each other to the death. Out of twelve Districts, entered twelve boys and twelve girls. One of the 24 was allowed to survive, and would be crowned Victor. The Victors got special privileges but few of them aged well. Many committed suicide within a few years. Most others stayed mentally ill and survived as best they could. They had to lead the next year's two children to their fight to the death, and that is not a good thing to do. Enough years of doing it would exhaust anybody.

Families who didn't want tesserae, found that their children were entered in the Reaping anyway. Some said that the air we breathe, was a gift from the Capitol, and counted as tesserae. Others said the air was free, but the water we drink, or the food we eat, or our safety from monstrous creatures called Muttations or Mutts, was a gift of the Capitol for which we owed them our lives.

Still others stayed out of the discussion, and said it was dangerous to discuss Capitol policy. Peacekeepers were known to flog people with leather whips for anything they said in public, that sounded critical of the Capitol. Occasionally someone was tortured with electric shocks and dumped by their home, blue and shaking, for their children to see. Some folks were simply shot in the head with a pistol. A handful were jailed and put on trial before a Tribunal. The Tribunals usually sentenced people to die by hanging, or else, to be rendered voiceless by a surgical procedure and put to work as slaves. _Lingua mali, pars pessima servi _went the wisdom...the tongue is the very worst part of a bad slave. Hence, those set to work at slavery, were first made avocal, or voiceless.

The poor bastard whose identity I took, "733A", was an Avox from my home district. I wasn't briefed on his history. I did not know his name, and he could never speak it again. Since he could not speak, no one was about to ask him any personal details. "Erik Wasserstrom" was, of course, many years dead. I had just gotten promoted to Captain, when he expired of a brain hemorrhage while teaching a calculus class. Portia's new husband, Lieutenant Talbot, was a musician and a bit of an actor, for a hobby, and he could get Portia and Boggs and even Erik Wasserstrom laughing, with his realistic impressions of Erik Wasserstrom. So Lt Levias Talbot had once shown his act when President Coin had the chance to watch, and immediately after Erik's funeral, Coin proposed that Talbot go under cover, as Wasserstrom, and infiltrate the Capitol as a District Thirteen defector.

At the moment, Talbot was cursing the slick mountain road on which we were driving, and I was doing my best not to laugh out loud, at what sounded like his impression of Col Boggs' favorite curses. We finally got below the snow line and the pavement became wet instead of icy. He pulled off the road and handed me a snow brush. I climbed out, getting into character as the servant, and dutifully wiped every last flake of snow off the car. To all appearances, we had stayed in the city and had been out in the rain.

We turned off the mountain road onto an oddly lit street, that curved around the mountainside. The homes were luxurious and the street lined with evergreens, pines or perhaps aspen. We pulled up in a driveway that faced a three-car garage. The house had walls of rounded stones set into concrete, and seemed colorful, even in the dark.

I exited the car, trotted to open the driver's door and helped Talbot out, then went ahead of him to sound the doorbell.

The door opened and a gaunt woman with alert eyes answered.

"Doctor Wasserstrom, good evening!"

I held open the door and avoided eye contact. Talbot entered, wiping his shoes on the doormat, and I followed him in silently.

"Wiress, so good of you to join us for the evening."

"I'll get Beetee. He seems preoccupied with something. Do sit down, please."

Suddenly began the sounds of Beetee and Talbot having a talk about music. Apparently Beetee had recorded a previous evening's visit between Wasserstrom, Wiress, and himself. And, predictably, his house was bugged.

Beetee Latier followed Wiress into the living room, and motioned for us to follow him into a small study. The walls were covered in thin gold foil of some sort. Apparently the study was a Faraday cage, in which any electromagnetic signals would be trapped. There was a square table in the middle, with a Holo on it. A rack of equipment on the wall blinked with diode lights. Beetee pressed a switch, one of the diodes glowed yellow, and he sang out, "May the odds be ever in our favor.". He pointed at Wiress. She echoed him, word for word. He pointed at Talbot, who sang out likewise. Then at me.

"May the odds be ever in our favor", I said. And I enjoyed the privilege of speaking, again.

Beetee flipped another switch and the yellow light turned green.

"An echo inverter. You can speak freely while it's lit green, because any sound you make, it plays the inverse of the sound, to the bugging equipment outside. The bug hears only the recording, because our voices add to our inverted voices, and cancel themselves out. Would anyone like a beer?"

I grinned broadly. "Mike Fuser, Colonel, commanding Special Defense Lab", and offered my hand. Beetee and Wiress shook my hand firmly. "And yes, I will have a beer."

We were on our second beer each, when Dr Beetee Latier got around to the real reason that he had joined the Rebels.

"Ever hear of Nikola Tesla?"

"Invented the polyphase electric motor, didn't he?", I said.

"Old news. But what he failed at, was a scheme to capture energy from thunderstorms. He failed because he lacked a suitable material."

Wiress had a twinkle in her eyes, almost like she was feeling sexy.

Talbot and I looked at each other, and he looked as baffled, as I felt.

"He wanted what, some kind of big windmill that follows thunderstorms around?", guessed Talbot.

Wiress giggled and her eyes looked impish.

"Of course, that would recover a little energy, but not nearly what Tesla had in mind. Guys, picture a cloud droplet.", said Beetee.

"Of water?", I asked.

Wiress gave me an approving nod.

"Yes, water. About half a billion molecules of water per drop. Actually 555.6 million molecules of water is the right sized drop. That's precisely 0.2854439 femtoliters, which is pretty damned small, of course."

Wiress giggled again.

"A new curse for the kids in basic training. 'May you swallow a femtoliter of water at a time' ", said Talbot. Wiress and I smiled. Beetee gave Talbot an annoyed look.

"For every 555.6 million water molecules, on average, there are two molecules that get a little weird. The hydrogen atom falls off of one and attaches to the other. The electronic shell around each oxygen atom must be balanced, and the balance is achieved by forming a positive ion, H3O+, and a negative ion, OH-. Get the droplet cold enough to freeze, and a funny thing happens. The neutral water molecules squeeze out the two charged ones, because at quantum distances, there is more energy released by all 555.6 million molecules bonding together into ice, than it takes to pull the two charges apart. So the ice crystal looks like a needle, with opposite charges at the pointy ends. A few hundred such needles of ice, will attach themselves in a network, plus and minus ends attached to one another, and when they weigh enough to overcome atmospheric lift, they sink into denser air. The water vapor in the air, if it's supercooled, will attach itself to the surface of the net of ice needles and the whole network will thicken to become a snowflake, like the ones falling on top of the mountain this evening. Damned few snowflakes ever are completely alike, because of that random assortment that creates their outline."

Beetee paused a moment. My gaze flipped to Talbot's face. He seemed amused. I wondered if it was my random stunt with the parachute this evening, that came to mind.

Beetee went on. "Now suppose that there's a collision between snowflakes that shatters a few ice needles. Now we see a charge imbalance. The unbalanced charge migrates away, in response to any local electric field. For some, that field is the Aurora, caused by ions in the solar wind that are jetting out of sunspots into space. The aurora causes negative charge to migrate up. The water molecules evaporate off, the supercold ion loses some weight, and drifts to the edge of the atmosphere and collects in four permanent layers of ion clouds. The positive charges, meanwhile, fall to the ground in snowflakes that melt into raindrops. The sea, and most ground water, acquires a positive charge, and the upper air ion clouds have a net-negative charge. What closes the circuit, of course, is the Aurora. Charge transfers within the plasma of the aurora, usually onto smoke or dirt, settles back to the sea, and the charge is neutralized."

Wiress looked at Talbot, who looked like he had missed a step. "The dirt comes from volcanic eruptions and meteors that burn up in the atmosphere".

Talbot nodded Wiress his thanks.

"Tesla learned of an inventor named Lee DeForest, who built a vacuum triode that could be used to amplify signals, and figured out that the four ion layers of atmosphere, and the sea, are the two outer elements of a planet-sized triode. The charge-forming mechanism in thunderstorms, constantly charges the outer elements up, they discharge near the Aurora, and all he needed to do, was pump energy into the Aurora to get it resonating, for this mechanism to launch a planet-circling electromagnetic wave, fed with the energy of every thunderstorm on the planet. All that anyone would need to do, is put up an antenna that's big enough, tap into that wave, and get energy out of storms, everywhere on the planet."

I had not heard of that idea. "So what happened?".

"History."

Wiress saw Beetee's pained look and jumped in. "Tesla underestimated, first off, the amount of meteor dust in space. There was another American in the mix, a German immigrant named Karl Steinmetz, who helped with Tesla's polyphase motor at General Electric. Steinmetz wasn't much of an actor. Tesla was. There was a fellow named John Muir, in California, who got a group of nature-lovers together called The Sierra Club. Muir and his club opposed building a dam, that was to supply water to a city called San Francisco, and generate electric power. General Electric had agreed to build the generators. Muir was worried that too many dams would eliminate all the world's noisy waterfalls, and folks who were embarrassed to be heard making noises while mating, would have nowhere private that they could go, to get laid. Which got Muir a following. Wealthy educated people in Muir's day, never admitted to mating at all. They reasoned that being in love with one person, would make others jealous of their love, and get them angry and feeling left out. So nobody spoke about the things that were actually important to them, and instead, found other silly things to care about."

"Like the Capitol's Hunger Games?", I said. "They don't let District people express any feelings of envy, because it's a good way to get whipped, electrocuted, shot, hanged, or Avoxed. And the Capitol wastes so much stuff, no one there has time to feel left out."

"Very good, Mike!". Wiress was grinning broadly. "It made for social instability, because to put on the appearance of never mating, the wealthy had damned few children and the poor, who could least afford their care and teaching, had many. This dumbed down their entire society and excluded most people from acquiring knowledge. To be smart was to be asexual. To be sexy, one had to appear stupid. Warfare became a social necessity, because in a society that valued stupidity, every few decades, enough ignorance would accumulate, to where most young people thought a war was a good idea. Enough would get killed, to where folks who wanted to try peace, eventually ended the wars. But as long as it was fashionable to hate people for their pleasures, the peace makers would blame war on too much pleasure, not on too little. And the war makers were happy with that, because in combat zones, pleasure is harder to find than anywhere else. Kids who are accustomed to going without, make obedient soldiers.

Wiress looked at us. Seeing our rapt attention, she continued. "Steinmetz had no idea what to do about John Muir. Tesla invited Muir to lunch and had a chat. And then another. After a few lunches, Muir realized that the main reason that his club's beloved wilderness was too crowded, was that cities weren't any fun to live in. They stunk all the time, from rotting horse manure and coal smoke. Poor people sat indoors behind window screens and suffered from the heat and the smell. Or went outdoors to cool off, and suffered from the flies and mosquitoes. And the smell. And the occasional epidemic spread by the flies and mosquitoes. Rich people vacated the cities for the seashore or the mountains to stay cool. It became so common, the Americans invented a word for it. Any recreational travel was called a Vacation, because in hot weather, most people wanted to vacate the stinky cities."

Wiress looked at Talbot and at me. Seeing no questions, she went on. "If city life was more comfortable, fewer people would vacate the cities for the wilderness, and the wilderness would remain wild. What if electric railcars transported people around the cities, and there weren't so many horses crapping in them? What if electric power cooked their food, so houses stayed cooler and didn't stink like coal smoke? Trading a few waterfalls near cities, for eliminating the stench, made sense. But what really sold Muir on the San Francisco dam, was Tesla's thunderstorm power idea. Building enough dams to power the Aurora Resonance system, meant that in the foreseeable future, people would get all the energy they needed, just by putting up an antenna, without building any more dams."

I asked what came to mind. "So Tesla built up a following. How smart were they?"

Wiress broke out laughing, and tried to say, "Not very", but it came out sounding like 'mott berry', which got the four of us laughing.

I took a swig of my beer. Good stuff. Smooth taste, a bit like bread. Just a hint of bitter herbs, probably hop plants like those we grew in Thirteen, that we grind with hemp seed to make a treatment for belly cramps.

"The following was quite enthusiastic, but Tesla and Steinmetz could not deliver results quickly enough, and started taking dumb risks. From watching auroras, Tesla concluded that auroras resonate at 24 Hertz. Every second, there are 24 vibrations. But the aurora does not synchronize the vibrations. They vortex. Each vortex looks a bit like a screw, and spins. What Tesla needed was a way to get the screws to slow down and speed up, to release that energy in a planet-circling wave. He guessed that putting a ball on the end of an antenna would launch a new kind of electromagnetic wave that moved faster than light. Einstein guessed it would not work. Tesla, believing it would work, wanted to use it to force every vortex in the aurora to move with a rhythm, and he set up a demonstration. At a place called Pike's Peak, Tesla set up a hydroelectric generating plant to power an electric railway and a gold refining plant. He built a laboratory there. And he used some of the energy to launch a 24-Hertz signal with his ball antenna. The results weren't pretty."

"What happened? ", asked Talbot.

Wiress giggled. "Damage."

"What sort of damage?", I asked.

"The expensive kind.", said Beetee. " Generators in 140 neighboring towns got caught in Tesla's wave and became overloaded by a short circuit in the aurora. They melted. The towns that paid for them, sued Tesla for damages. General Electric forbid Steinmetz from doing business with Tesla, because they were competing to sell generators to replace those that melted, and did not want anyone to charge them with destroying 140 generators on purpose and selling replacements for profit. All of which interfered with anyone learning what had actually happened. Tesla got depressed after that, and his health failed. He died broke and confused."

"What does this have to do with materials?", I asked.

"Everything." Beetee exchanged grins with Wiress, before going on. "The main flaw in Tesla's planning, was that he assumed the atmosphere to be a better resistor of current, than it actually is. On average, Earth's atmosphere offers about 300 ohms of resistance. Free space has an impedance of 277 ohms. Inside an auroral vortex, considerably less. Tesla's experiment on Pike's Peak probably created a local vortex with about a one to maybe five ohm impedance to any signal at 24 hertz. The effect on all the nearby towns with generators, is that when the wave hit, the air between their wires stopped insulating and started conducting current. Instead of draining energy from faraway thunderstorms, he drew it out of all those nearby generators. The generators became overloaded, heated up, and the copper melted."

"What General Electric and their competition guessed from the experiment, is that it was unsafe to make generators that ran at frequencies near 24 hertz, because an auroral vortex could happen from natural causes, anywhere, and melt the generators. So they moved away from it. Deutsche Bundesbahn ran their electric trains on 18 hertz. English Electric picked 50 hertz. General Electric ran their new equipment on 60 hertz. The higher frequency enabled more energy to pass through the same equipment, so a lot of capacity was added to the world's power grids in the early 20th century, while protecting against another auroral vortex striking. But what nobody did, at the time, was figure out what was happening inside an auroral vortex."

"Did you?", I asked.

"Almost. Actually, nobody can fully know what's happening there, because it's a quantum phenomenon. The parts that are predictable, only appear, after the unpredictable parts have happened already. But we can make some guesses about the predictable parts and wait for them to appear. Or we can force them to appear."

Talbot looked sharply at me. Wiress was snickering. "I'm lost. How do we force quantum phenomena to appear?"

"Okay, Mike, try this idea. How do you remember to wake up in the morning?"

"I just do."

"Another way to describe it, is that you make a habit of waking up. Which means that your past is affecting your future."

"So where's the connection?"

"There was a Canadian scientist named Geordie Rose who asked that same question, early in the 21st century. He had the idea to treat a math problem as a physics experiment. Cooling a system of current loops while varying a voltage applied to them, collapsed them to their lowest energy state. Rose called that 'quantum annealing'. The result was easier to get by experiment, than by running calculations. Basically, Rose simply allowed the phenomena to appear, measured them, and got his questions answered.

"The flaw in Tesla's analysis of the aurora, is that the quantum phenomena were already present, even though he ignored them. He inadvertently set a part of the atmosphere to minimum energy state. And what we need, is a reliable way to predict that minimum energy state. Geordie Rose's quantum annealing computer was almost good enough to crack the problem. He used superconducting current loops. So, to get there, I plan to make a hyperconductor that works at room temperature. And then repeat the Rose experiments in enough detail, to get a usable solution to Tesla's problem."

Wiress was grinning with anticipation. Talbot looked overwhelmed. I opened my big mouth and spit out the first question on my mind.

"What in hell is a hyperconductor?"

"Mike, what keeps electrons from collapsing into the atom's nucleus?", asked Beetee.

"Quantum mechanics?"

"Yes. What about them?"

"I have no idea."

"Precisely."

Beetee Latier paused for a sip of his beer.

"Just as people sleep by habit, electrons, by habit, do not crash into their nuclei."

"Why?"

"To know that, would require us to observe what electrons do. We can only measure huge swarms of electrons, not single ones, so we can't know. That's what Heisenberg wrote in the 1930's, and not a lot got done about the problem. Until Wiress got bored silly during the Seventy-first Hunger Games after both our Tributes got killed in the Bloodbath, and asked me a really challenging question."

Wiress blushed. Beetee motioned to her, and took a drink of his beer as she picked up the story.

"I conceived it this way. If I accelerated an atom closely to the speed of light, and the atom had a nuclear spin, like Carbon-13 does, one side of the nucleus would get to the speed of light, first. Whichever protons were spinning in the direction of travel, their speed would reach c, before the whole atom did. And if Einstein were correct, part of an atom's mass would become energy, while the other parts flew apart.

"So if Einstein were correct, there should be a quantum wall, just below c, beyond which a carbon-13 atom would not accelerate, without first losing it's nuclear spin and with that, it's magnetic resonance. Basically the atom would give up its spin energy and lose mass, as we sped it up with more kinetic energy. And the problem I saw with that, is that matter and energy would simply vanish as we added more. So it didn't make a lot of sense to me, that by adding more energy to an atom with a spinning nucleus, we would cause it's existing spin energy to disappear.

"That led me to consider that maybe a part of Einstein's theory was backwards. Instead of a quantum wall, there might be a quantum catapult of sorts, with the spin energy adding to the energy of forward motion, not subtracting from it.

"So what I suggested is that we build a big particle accelerator and launch carbon-13 atoms at close to c. Either they break up and release energy. Or they get catapulted and they turn into energy. And then Beetee had a wonderful idea. He decided that we should make Carbon-13 and try it."

"Thanks, Wiress, but actually we got lucky", said Beetee. "I built a magnetic device called a Calutron, and separated some carbon into the two isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13. I made a thin layer of graphene on smooth glass, out of pure carbon-13. And if I did that inside the Calutron, with the magnet at full power, I got a lot of conductivity in the graphene sheet. If I turned the magnet off, I got ordinary graphene. Then Wiress came up with a plan."

Beetee smiled at Wiress with appreciation, and took a long drink of his beer.

"My plan is to repeat Beetee's process on a larger scale.", she said. "The hyperconductive graphene is formed by a magnetic field that causes the carbon nuclei to spin in step with each other. If the field is strong enough, the atoms align their spins first, as plasma, then stay aligned as they bond into graphene. So we can use the hyperconductive graphene to make stronger magnets for separating the carbon isotopes and for putting down layers of hyperconductor on objects."

"So a little bit of hyperconductor builds a machine that makes more of it?", I blurted.

"Exactly. One idea we saw, is that we can speed up the process of making a hyperconductor, if we found a richer source of carbon-13. District 5 has an old nuclear reactor that used graphite bricks as a neutron moderator. The unit is about ninety years old. Those graphite bricks have absorbed neutrons and some carbon-13 was created in them. If we convince the Capitol to give us those bricks as raw material, we can work a lot faster at creating hyperconductive products."

I had an idea. "In District 13 we have four graphite reactors that are even older. Two are already shut down. We could make this stuff ourselves, if you are ready to move in with us."

"The Capitol knows about our work. If we vanish, they will try to copy it. It would be safer if the Capitol used up their carbon-13 supply to make an object, that we could capture and take to District Thirteen, then use ourselves. That way, Thirteen has the advantage.", said Beetee.

"So that's why we're giving this away to a Gamemaker?"

"Yes. And not all of it. Wiress and I will persuade the new Head Gamemaker that we can build a lightning machine, in time for the Quarter Quell. To get the hyperconductive wire for the lightning machine, we'll have to make it. We'll need a carbon-13 source. The Head Gamemaker sells the idea to Snow. District 3 builds it. And we raid the 75th Hunger Games and take the wire."

"Why would they let you do that?", asked Talbot.

"Because they are proud and very vain. They want the districts to worship them like gods. Who is Zeus, without a lightning bolt?"

Beetee should have been an intelligence analyst, I thought. Then said as much. "Okay, your guess is that the Capitol will be so enthralled with owning a machine that makes lightning, that they won't look beyond the Quarter Quell and ask, 'Why do Beetee and Wiress want to build this machine?'".

"It's a calculated risk. Remember Dr Guillotine?"

"I heard the name once."

"Guillotine built a machine for the king of France, about five hundred years ago, that chopped people's heads off. A guy named Robespierre overthrew the king, and wanted to know if Guillotine's machine worked. So Robespierre arrested Dr Guillotine, and tested the machine on him. Guillotine's head came off with ease. And Robespierre went on to use it on the king and a lot of other folks he didn't like. My guess is, if I don't convince the Capitol that I'm building the lightning machine out of my undying appreciation for Coriolanus Snow, they will try to kill me and not worry about my intentions for the machine. In which case, I shall appreciate a hoverplane flight to Thirteen."

"That's a risk you both are willing to take?", I asked.

"Yes."

"Do we know if the lightning machine works?"

"Yes. It works. In my lab I have several chunks of broken glass that are covered in graphene hyper conductor. Some more pieces will break, when we're testing the generator tomorrow. My plan, you see, is that there must be a considerable amount of hyperconductor made, to provide enough spare parts to keep the lightning machine running for the whole Quarter Quell. They stockpile it. We raid the Arena and capture it. Meanwhile, we make more in Thirteen."

"We make more?", I asked.

"Yes. You, as my temporary Avox, are going to clean up and pack all of that cracked glass tomorrow and haul it out of my lab, right under Seneca Crane's nose. And after you take out my trash, you're going to load it in an empty coal car. The train hauls it to District Twelve where it gets dumped down a mine shaft for disposal, along with our other hazardous waste, and the nuclear waste from District Five. Meanwhile, you're going to be met by a hovercraft and lifted away, with all that material I trashed, take it back to Thirteen, and build something with it. The train crew won't know it is missing. Nor that you guys were ever aboard."

It sounded like a good plan.


	3. Chapter 3: Seneca's Shocking

Chapter Three: Seneca's Shocking

Dawn came late and the dreary gray of a drizzly morning lit my camp in Beetee's basement. I folded up the bedroll, neatly, hiked up to the kitchen, and helped myself to a pair of boiled eggs and some odd round bits of hard, chewy bread, with holes in the center and covered with salt crystals, that I thought were called bagels. I brewed a pot of coffee for Talbot and Beetee, and I grabbed myself a taste of it. Bitter, but not bad. Another luxury we lacked in Thirteen.

With some Peacekeeper doing the boring job of listening to the bug in Beetee's house, I thought it best to sound like a servant. So I scrubbed the guest bathroom. When Beetee rose and showered, I made up his bed. And Talbot's. I cooked breakfast...a cheese omelet with bits of spicy sausage and chopped green peppers, overlaid with sliced tomatoes, and more of those hard chewy round bread loaves, with a garnish of sliced melon and green grapes.

I finally learned from Beetee's conversation with Talbot, that the tiny loaves were indeed called bagels, and that they originated in Eastern Europe many years ago, among some people called Jews. If my education has the facts straight, three Jews in Nazi Germany, named Hahn, Strassman, and Meitner, discovered atomic energy, but the Nazis persecuted Jewish Germans so severely, murdering nearly all of them, that the inventors tried to defect, and their discovery got developed by the Americans and British and was put to use. Hell, dictators always fear smart people. There was another Twentieth century dictator named Pol Pot, who drove bulldozers over people for the crime of possessing three or more books, or owning a pair of reading glasses. When one of Mr Pot's accomplices was tried for war crimes, years later, the new government had to deploy twenty thousand grunts to protect the judge and the hangman while they did their duty. Apparently a quarter million or so of the survivors rioted before the trial, demanding to tear the bastard limb from limb, before the new government could finish convicting and hanging him. And then there's our recent pain in the arse, Coriolanus Snow. Our esteemed guest, Seneca, needed to be curious enough to want lightning in his Hunger Games, for Beetee's plan to work. But the risk to Seneca, and to Beetee, of displaying such curiosity, was how Snow would see them both. They were dead meat, if Snow saw them as rivals. Or even as potential rivals. Even if they didn't want Snow's job.

If I started speaking out loud today, I'd likely spend my last week alive, in Snow's torture chamber, I thought. A reason to get back to work.

I went upstairs after serving breakfast, scrubbed Beetee's shower stall and bathroom sink, then returned to clear the table and scrub the dishes and cookware. Then I cleaned the entry and parlor carpeting. I was finishing up when two men in dark blue trench coats drove up in a limousine. In the rear seat was a dapper fellow who had the most elaborately-trimmed beard I had ever seen.

I pointed to my throat as I opened the door. Trenchcoat Number One crawled back in the limo. Trenchcoat Number Two peered at my Avox card, and asked for my master. I motioned for him to come in and be seated. And then went out in the garage to look for Beetee.

On the way there I stumbled into Wiress, sipping hot coffee and wearing flannel pajamas with a pink robe.

She lifted her right leg and grabbed the toe of her black slipper, hollering "Watch where you walk, you big oaf!".

I blushed and bowed to Wiress. And pointed to the visitors.

"Aha! Seneca Crane has come to Beetee's humble home! We are so honored by your presence, young man. Follow me to meet Beetee, please.", said Wiress, pulling on an overcoat to chase the chill, and leading us all, with a trace of a limp, into Beetee's spacious garage.

In the farthest bay of the cavernous garage sat what can only be called an historical find: A 1972-vintage Mustang Shelby GT, announced a small sign. The paint job was bright red, with black racing stripes, and oversized tires looking very shiny, indeed. It obviously had cost Beetee a small fortune to keep the vehicle in this condition. The rubber tires and hoses and drive belts, and the vinyl top, all tended to become terribly brittle and crack after a few decades. Yet this masterpiece was fully intact after a couple of centuries had passed. Somehow, Beetee must have made replacement parts for those items. I would have been speechless at the sight. Fortunately, my cover as an Avox required me to stay speechless all the time. I did make the effort not to stare at the centerpiece of his collection, for as Beetee's servant, I ought to be familiar with the garage.

The two nearer bays appeared to be a lab and workshop for Beetee. There were a few mechanical items: A drill press, a milling machine, and assorted hand tools for working with metal, wood, and plastic. And an electronics bench replete with some impressive test equipment. Directly in front was the demonstration we were about to witness. A contraption of coiled wires that shined like gold, surrounding a curved tube of glass, reposed beneath a floodlight. I recognized a grey machine to be a vacuum pump. Four glass insulators, each a foot long, connected a pair of fat gold wires to some sort of coil. And a tall, cylindrical tank labeled "Nitrogen".

Wiress seemed uncomfortable, standing in her slippers on chilly concrete, and she looked behind the scrap bin, found a worn cardboard box with markings from a paper mill in District Six, set it on the floor, and jumped on it twice, flattening it out, leaving an insulating barrier between warm feet and cold concrete. Amazingly, she didn't spill her coffee while jumping. I was impressed with her talent.

Beetee and Wasserstrom emerged from the house and conversed with Seneca Crane in hushed tones. I caught the words "defector" and "mathematician", and saw a look of surprise on Seneca's face, but none from Trenchcoat, who seemed to know that already. I busied myself picking recyclable scrap out of Beetee's trash and sorting it into bins.

"Boy! Come here!", barked Beetee. Assuming that was master to Avox talk, I jumped up and came to where Beetee stood. "Can you read '30', boy?"

I nodded affirmatively.

"Good. When I say 'Start', you are to open this valve until the needle on the gauge points to 30. Which way is open, boy?"

I motioned counter-clockwise with my right hand.

"Which way is closed?"

I motioned clockwise.

"Good, you understand, boy. I shall not need to find another Avox while you are alive".

I noticed Trenchcoat grinning at that.

Seneca looked frightened.

"You want to live long enough to taste lunch today, boy?"

I nodded affirmatively.

"If that needle falls below 30, open the valve more. If it rises, close the valve a little. If the valve won't turn any more, beat this table with your fist so I hear it, boy. I must stop the experiment if that happens, or the machine will blow up and kill you."

I nodded my head slowly, to show I understood.

"Wiress, where is my good video camera?"

"In the Shelby."

"Thanks."

Beetee popped open the trunk of the Mustang Shelby GT, pulled out a video camera and a tripod, and set it up, aimed at the apparatus. "The gold micropiping is rather pricy, and that's before I plated the exterior with mercurial calcium cuprate. It's refrigerated to 200 Kelvins by shooting compressed nitrogen at three thousand kilopascals, through a pinhole into a vacuum we keep near twenty pascals of pressure. The gold efficiently cools the plating and makes it superconducting, just like in a MagLev Hovercraft, but without using liquid hydrogen. If it overheats there will be an explosive burst and I shall need a new Avox and several weeks to build a replacement. So let's be careful and conserve time."

Seneca looked aghast.

Trenchcoat looked amused.

Beetee continued. "What you see here, is my version of a Tesla coil. It is two concentric coils, one coupling to the other by its induced magnetic field. When I interrupt the field in the first coil by shorting it with the Krytron, the second coil, which is the tall one, must lose its field too. The only way it can do that, is to set off a big electrical spark. Which is what lightning is."

Krytrons I knew about. They were a kind of electrically-activated switch, that turned on rapidly. Some old nuclear weapons designs required them. The Krytron to which Beetee was pointing, looked as big as my fist. The current it conducted must be large, I thought.

"To get the current large enough for arena-scale lightning", said Beetee, "we need a bigger Krytron to short the current. I propose to create one, using a particle accelerator called a Calutron, to make the material for it. And I propose to build it at Capitol Hospital, in the blood cancer lab that our President Snow has authorized."

And there it was. Beetee's leverage.

Boggs and Talbot had confirmed, from four different sources, that Snow was slowly dying of a rare form of blood cancer. His doctors could keep creating more of his blood in the lab. But the new blood had the same genetic failing as his existing blood...and the cancer would spread to it. They were exploring an old treatment, called Synchrotron Radiation Therapy. Powerful X-rays formed by accelerating charged particles around a magnet, would bombard the cancer cells in his blood, to slow their spread into the new blood. If successful, they would keep the cancer in check, until Snow died of something else. Hopefully a rope, I thought.

Beetee was promising to build a Calutron, and run it as a Synchrotron. To keep Snow Alive. And make a lightning machine for the Quarter Quell. And covertly to arm the Second Rebellion with his graphene hyperconductors. He would accumulate Carbon-13 for the Rebel army, in the process of treating Snow's blood cancer. A brilliant move, if he could do it...getting Snow to pay for his own overthrow, without realizing that he had.

"Let's move inside and watch the test on video.", said Beetee. Everyone followed him indoors. I stood there, flummoxed. I had no idea how to play an Avox who was scared half to death, so I stood very still.

"Boy, turn on the nitrogen!", ordered Beetee through a loudspeaker.

I obeyed.

As the gauge approached 30, the vacuum pump started up. About twenty seconds later, I saw fine granules of ice forming on the gold tubing. What felt like hours but was actually about three minutes, elapsed, as the ice needles built up into a thick layer of white, covering the gold. I carefully watched the gauge and kept the pressure at 30.

Then the machinery started humming.

A bright, bluish-white flash came from inside the glass chamber. Then another. Then more frequently.

I wondered if that was the Synchrotron.

Then a huge arc passed between two rods standing on end, about ten feet off the floor and maybe six feet apart. There was a noise like cloth tearing, and then a snapping sound.

And I realized that I was looking at a miniature thunder bolt.

What the hell had Beetee Latier built? I was fairly sure he wasn't trying to kill me, but it wouldn't be the first time someone died in their own experiment.

Another giant arc.

And then another.

My vision was getting spotty from the bright flashes. Perfect time for a headache.

Suddenly a wire began to smoke, on the farthest rod. The arc flashed again, and the smoking wire broke. I slammed my fist on the table.

No wire, the next arc could go most anywhere. I started to slam my fist a second time, when a brighter arc flashed, this time between the rod, and Beetee's historic Mustang. The snapping sound was quite loud. And then came the sound of shattering glass.

"Boy! Turn off the gas!", came Beetee's voice through the loudspeaker, as the machinery shut down.

I obeyed.

Then I saw the extent of the damage. The glass tube had shattered. The floodlight had melted and was smoking. Bits of an odd-looking kind of glass fell all over the floor. One of the gold tubes had melted into a ball.

Beetee's prize Mustang had a smoking hole, about an inch across, burnt through its roof.

Beetee ran frantically into the garage, carrying a fire extinguisher. He pulled the right-side door open, and revealed that the cloth liner under the car's roof, was burning. He gave the fire a couple shots of white ammonium phosphate powder from the extinguisher, and a cloud of white dust blew around. When he emerged, quite a bit of that powder had absorbed in his full head of kinky African hair, and every time he moved, some powder would fall from his head. His deadly serious demeanor contrasted starkly, with his farcical appearance. I got a truly memorable view of him, as he ran up to my position and gave a blast of white powder to the smoking floodlight, white powder dropping off his hair with each step, as he ran.

Trenchcoat, who was in the garage by then, pointed and laughed at the sight. Beetee looked like he'd fallen in a baker's flour bin. Or a bin of baking powder.

Beetee Latier did not look amused.

If he had planned this turn of events, he hid it well. For a moment, I worried he would punch Trenchcoat, and we'd end up at the Head Peacekeeper's office.

Then Wiress spoke up.

"Where's the baking soda?"

Beetee gave her a questioning look.

"Some bicarbonate and water would make bubbles in your hair. We get Finnick Odair to model it in Capitol Couture, and call it 'The Foaming Seas Look'.".

Beetee stared back at Wiress a few seconds, then burst out laughing.

Wasserstrom started chuckling.

Everybody ignored me. The Avox would have nothing to say, except to sneeze at the smells.

Then Beetee spoke.

"We'll need to call Environmental to get rid of this stuff. The mercury is hazardous."

Seneca looked sharply at Beetee. "Doctor Latier, will this happen at the hospital in the Capitol?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I won't put a Tesla coil and a lightning machine at the Capitol. Note, please, the Krytron wasn't damaged."

"And can we make sure the wires don't melt, during the Games?"

"We need more of my hyperconductive fused graphite. This piece of copper wire is what failed. If you notice, see this greenish tinge in the break?"

Seneca nodded. So did Trenchcoat.

"The green is copper oxide. This wire had broken once before, and the last person to use it, probably brazen-welded the two pieces together and didn't clean away the corrosion where it broke. Which left a weak spot, where it broke again. My hyperconductive cable does not corrode. It will take some time to make, but it shouldn't be a problem."

"In that case, let's do a Gamemaker's special. We'll ship it out on the hazardous waste train to District Thirteen, with District Three's radioactive waste, and have the Avoxes dump it down the abandoned mine shaft. I'll keep the origin and composition, secret. Your Avox can do the cleanup?"

"That's all this one knows how to do, is clean up."

"Then turn him loose. I'll tell the President my plans. We'll put a lightning machine in the Quarter Quell. And you will make the parts you need, using the Synchrotron Lab at Capitol Hospital Cancer Center, that will be announced this week. And, of course, you will build the Synchrotron."

They shook hands.

Wiress said, "This calls for a toast. There's a bottle of two century old wine from a place called the Escarpment Vineyards of Ontario, wherever that was, chilling in the fridge. Let's see if it turned to vinegar."

And they left the Avox with the cleaning job.


End file.
